Similar to playing SEGA on your friend’s parents’ top-of-the line —1995— surround sound, big screen television, while blaring a mixtape of tracks you heard on the radio and hit the [REC]-button: Nmesh’s newest Pharma on Orange Milk Records is like seeing Speed in a drive-in theater where you snuck in and plugged your headphones into the speaker-receiver.
Like, there’s vaporwave, and vaporwave, and vaporwave — plenty of vaporwave — and few pull it off in great antithesis like Nmesh with such a nostalgic clarity, almost HD memory still foggy, and a bit molded in the basement, but bud-flowering the purpose of tape and release. Like how Lee Nobel’s Reflection Disc 1&2 2012-2016 was a compilation of tracks, Pharma fleshes out the idea that a release can be presented in total as a collection, rather than out-takes and b-sides in need of a home. Pharma is like if The Caretaker and Avalanches collaborated on the soundtrack for 2018’s The Jetsons real-life movie. Like how metal takes something super serious and runs with it in a “We believe this lore and our band now embraces it through the might of bard and song” type shit. Pharma is the 2017 metal hand we’ve been waiting to raise:
